VIM – Advanced Text Editor

Vim (“Vi IMproved”) is an advanced text editor that allows syntax highlighting, word completion and has a huge amount of contributed content.

Vim offers several “modes” for editing with efficiency. This makes vim a non-user-friendly application but it is also a strength. The normal mode binds alphanumeric keys to task-oriented commands. The visual mode highlights text. The command-line mode offers more tools (for search&replace, defining functions, etc.

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

Vim is often called a “programmer’s editor,” and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It’s not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing an email to editing configuration files.

Vim can be configured to work in a very simple (Notepad-like) way, called eVim or Easy Vim.

What Vim Is Not?

Vim isn’t an editor designed to hold its users’ hands. It is a tool, the use of which must be learned.

Vim isn’t a word processor. Although it can display text with various forms of highlighting and formatting, it isn’t there to provide WYSIWYG editing of typeset documents. (It is great for editing TeX, though.)